Brussels date for foresight team

maart 09, 2009

ENDURE’s foresight team will head to Brussels, Belgium, in April to present their study examining European crop protection towards the year 2030 to an invited audience of politicians, legislators and research directors.

Some of ENDURE's foresight expert group, pictured in Paris, February 2009. Copyright: ENDURE.

The use of foresight has become increasingly important across Europe in recent years as it is a form of forward thinking that seeks to provide legislators and decision makers with the tools they need to tackle proactively future challenges.

Not to be confused with prediction, foresight seeks to gather intelligence from a broad range of sources in a systematic way and to use this information to improve both the quality and impact of strategic decisions and to improve our ability to react to future changes.*

In the case of ENDURE, this intelligence gathering process has been underway since 2007 with the formation of an expert group representing a range of scientific disciplines, including sociology and economics in addition to the physical sciences.

This group has held seven expert group meetings in six European countries (France, Netherlands, UK, Denmark, Spain and Hungary) and discussion meetings in Germany and Italy. In addition, in-depth interviews have been conducted with various stakeholders concerned with crop protection, including agro-chemical companies, members of ENDURE’s External Advisory Board and researchers from other institutes. Furthermore, field visits have been made to various farms around Europe to gain insights into different strategies.

The process has enabled the team to draw up five very different scenarios for European crop protection heading towards the year 2030. Two of these are based on how European agriculture might respond to free market policies, two are based on European responses to global challenges (namely food security and energy supplies) and a fifth scenario examines how agriculture might respond to more local demands.

From these scenarios it has been possible to extrapolate what scientific knowledge already exists to satisfy their varied demands, which research areas will need to be strengthened further and which technologies may help provide major breakthroughs.

The foresight team will use the Brussels experience to refine further the scenarios before publishing the complete study at the end of 2009.